IN LESS THAN a lifetime South Korea has undergone a huge transformation. In the mid-20th century, when it was poor and ruled by a dictator, it was not so different from its communist northern neighbour (though it was aligned with the United States). It has become a democracy of 52m people and an economic and technological powerhouse. Its music and films entrance hundreds of millions of people who don't speak a word of Korean. South Korea is justly proud of these achievements, but there are aspects of its society and politics that it is less eager to talk about. Among its worries are one of the world's lowest birth rates, inequalities of both class and gender and an over-cosy relationship between business and politics. Here are a film and a book to help you understand South Korea's light and dark sides. The Housemaid. Written and directed by Kim Ki-young Long before "Parasite", which won an Oscar in 2020, there was "The Housemaid". Kim Ki-young's thriller tells the story of a middle-class family that, on moving from their cramped traditional house to a larger dwelling, realise that they need to hire some help. When the housemaid seduces the paterfamilias and gets pregnant, the family's airy domicile becomes a claustrophobic house of horrors. Set in 1960, the film depicts South Korea before glass-and-steel skyscrapers and cookie-cutter apartment blocks came to dominate its city skylines. Establishing shots of undeveloped streets and open sky show how much the country has changed in 64 years, even if the traffic then was just as life-threatening. "The Housemaid" introduces viewers to themes that still preoccupy Korean society: the tension between tradition and modernity; the way women are treated as either caregivers or workers; and the conflict between classes in a society that is still very unequal. "The Housemaid" is an early example of the artistic prowess for which South Korea has become famous.

Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982. By Cho Nam-joo. Translated by Jamie Chang. Liveright; 176 pages; $14.95. Scribner; £9.99 It is not easy to be a woman in South Korea. At home women look after children-though fewer than they once did-and, too often, child-like husbands. Their circumstances at work are so poor that South Korea has come bottom of The Economist's glass-ceiling index for 12 years in a row. These indignities, and the fight against them, are well recounted in "Flower of Fire", a work of nonfiction. But novelists can penetrate where reporters cannot. The heroine of "Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982" is sexually abused by her teachers. Though she works harder than her male colleagues, her pay is lower. After she marries, the first suggestion of child-bearing comes when her husband casually suggests that they take the plunge just to stop his parents' nagging. After she gives birth and leaves her job, strangers in a park mock her as "mum-roach", assuming that she lives parasitically off her husband. "My routine, my career, my dreams, my entire life, my self-I gave it all up to raise our child. And I've become vermin. What do I do now?" Jiyoung laments at the novel's climax. Readers will not simply understand the plight of South Korean women; they will feel it.